On April 22, Chantilly, VA-based Perspecta Inc. announced that its applied research arm, Perspecta Labs, received a prime award for work on low-cost, resilient tactical radio communications under the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Resilient Networked Distributed Mosaic Communications (RN DMC) program. The contract, which represents new work for the company, has a potential total value of $18.5 million over a 45-month period of performance if all options are exercised.
The directional antennas and high-powered amplifiers currently used to support long-range tactical communications in remote areas are expensive and vulnerable to jamming and interference. The RN DMC program aims to deliver resilient, long-range tactical communications via self-forming, self-healing “mosaic” antennas made up of small, low power and cost transceiver elements (tiles) that can be hand-carried by warfighters and hosted on ground vehicles, high-altitude platforms and satellites.
Perspecta Labs will prototype, implement, test and validate an adaptive distributed array system solution that works with existing tactical radios and unmodified tactical waveforms.
“We are excited to design, develop and demonstrate low-cost, resilient long-range communications for challenging non-line-of-sight radio environments,” said Petros Mouchtaris, PhD, president of Perspecta Labs. “With innovative use of tiles, our solution will deliver a high-performance tactical radio communications solution which is flexible, robust and has significantly lower risk of detection, interference and jamming.”
Perspecta Labs’ solution uses wideband distributed spatial processing and a novel mechanism for joint signal processing and networking to meet high-performance requirements at low size, weight, power and cost. Experimental validation will progress from the laboratory to a long-range ground-to-air link and relay field exercises, which demonstrate communication over extremely challenging links that are not supportable using conventional tactical radio technology.
Source: Perspecta
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